Consumption theory has always been a neglected field in Post Keynesian economics, whereas it is at the center of New Keynesian economics. This paper investigates similarities and differences between the two approaches. I will show that the newer mainstream models indeed give results that are...

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a marked contraction in US consumption spending that had hitherto been boosted by historically high levels of household debt-financing. These events question the validity of conventional models of consumption based on the life-cycle...

We develop a Keynesian model of aggregate consumption. Our theory emphasizes the importance of the relative income hypothesis and debt-finance for understanding household consumption behavior. It is shown that particular importance attaches to how net debtor households service their debts, and...

This article assesses economic growth in the context of consumer saturation. We show that consumer based economies tend to suffer from demand saturation after an initial and prolonged period of growth. However, structural demand saturation irrevocably triggers a Minsky-type super cycle that is...

The Keynesian intuition that increasing consumption can stimulate investment is verified empirically using US macroeconomic data. The investment multiplier is hypothesized to increase monotonically with the propensity to consume. However, the functional relationship is not that of the Keynesian...

This paper has two main goals. The first is to show that behavioral rather than maximizing principles emerge from textual analysis as the microeconomic foundations for Keynes’s Consumption Theory; the second goal is to demonstrate the possibility of grounding a Keynesian-type aggregate...

Empirical research based on the Bhaduri/Marglin-variant of the Kaleckian model has recently shown that aggregate demand in many medium-sized and large open economies tends to be wage-led in the medium to long run, even in a period of increasing globalisation. In this paper we extend this type of...